Businesses for many years had access to thoughts, opinions, and data of ways to improve a travel policy’s satisfaction and compliance scores among travellers. For example, a recent GBTA survey concluded that traveller satisfaction efforts improve compliance.

They point out that there is a correlation between travel policy and traveller satisfaction and higher satisfaction correlates with high compliance.

There is no shortage of ideas around how to design a policy that saves costs on an annual basis. If the primary consideration is to reduce the costs on a budget line, then it is relatively easy to reduce your policy to a transactional model. This means making business travels less frequent, decrease the flexibility of fares purchased, use lower category hotels, etc.

However, UNIGLOBE experts argue in favour of a more holistic approach. This means considerations beyond price, such as productivity. This creates an opportunity to demonstrate the ‘value’ gained for the amount of travel purchased. As a business, you need to define your own version of ‘value’ of course. And then work with your UNIGLOBE expert to find the optimum place where costs are optimized against the ‘value’ or productivity garnered.

Does your company consider ‘travel outcome’ more important than a traveller would rate ‘willingness to travel’ for example? In other words, if the metrics that measure your travel policy do not include traveller experience and satisfaction, then you may be missing a key factor in the value garnered equation.

Ensure cost savings, high traveller satisfaction, high compliance, and optimized value for your travel program in 2018! Work with your UNIGLOBE expert to find the sweet spot of optimized productivity and employee satisfaction in your travel policy.